The bit where it segues into a looped sample of the Oblivion theme is genuinely remarkable. If this doesn’t lead to tears rolling down the cheeks of the devs who are surely, surely working on future Elder Scrolls projects right now, nothing can.

I totally agree with him, by the way. Fallout 3/NV leave me cold, but Oblivion was largely mega (acting/character models aside) and Morrowind was double-plus-ultra-mega. I would totally go for a new Elder Scrolls right now. New engine though, please. Please.

“Bethesda Game Director Todd Howard explained in a separate interview with IGN that his game would not use id Tech 5. The studio’s new engine built for its upcoming title is more beneficial to creating huge, open-world games, such as Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, while id Tech 5 is better for more contained environments. ”

…modders developing modular chunks of gameplay that can be slotted into the extant Rage world…
…other aspects of the game will actually be easier to work with than the company’s prior titles. “The description languages and the tools are a lot easier to use than the things we’ve done in the past,”…

So adding to the landscape is out, but all those other gameplay mods (including quests, apparently) seem to be perfectly feasible. If that’s what it takes to have a Tech 5 Elder Scrolls, I can live with it.

Me too. Fallout: New Vegas is an excellent game but the credit goes to Obsidian. Bethesda’s legacy of mediocrity includes awful textures, dull NPCs, forgettable plots and misused celebrity voice actors.

I’m assuming none of you have played Morrowind. I dislike Fallout 3 and Oblivion, and am enjoying New Vegas as well, but Morrowind is far superior to all three. It’s an aged game, but looking past the technology gap, along with adding some of the millions of mods, I think you’ll agree.

I have played all of them. For me it’s
New Vegas > Morrowind > Fallout 3 > Oblivion
Fallout 3 entertained me for a while, but I wouldn’t call it a great game. Oblivion I found dull. The level scaling in both annoyed me as hell. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, we made sure that wherever you go, that is the right direction! We promise you won’t be challenged or forced to think in any way!”

New Vegas and Morrowind on the other hand are great games and classics, due to the fantastic worlds and the stories to explore there.

Poor bit of rapping? Surely you cannot be into rap music at all. This was actually pretty brilliant as far as flow, technique and rhymes go, at least for this kind of thing (fanmade nerdcore rap). And I’m obsessed with (double)rhymes.
Not really heard anything better on the topic of videogames, apart from professional rappers that do music outside of the nerdy realm (the brilliant K-Murdoch & Mega Ran Album for example).

I came across Dan Bull just the other week via his Wikileaks tune, which I thought was awesome, and then moved onto various other things inc. his Generation Gaming tune, which was cool. Ended up ordering his CD, though the tracks on that predate all of these.

(Inspired by Alec’s adventures I wrote my own little homage article; of course I had to provide the link to the originals, not only to acknowledge Alec’s genius but also for anyone who wanted further reading. Google “Postcards from Morrowind”, if you’re interested.)

We really do need another Elder Scrolls game. Every game today seems to be brown, or set in a post-apocalytic setting.

Oblivion’s natural scenery and use of actual colours was a breath of fresh air. You don’t need to have a Brown/Grey colour palette to create atmosphere. Just some well modeled environments, and good music. Fallout 3 was good, but never captured me as much as Oblivion did. With Mods, I still return to Oblivion just for the scenery

This. Of the big Bethesda 4 (those being MW, Obv, FO3, and NV), I thought Oblivion was the worst of the bunch. It lacked the alien weirdness of Morrowind, the locales and mini stories of FO3, and the general all around greatness of NV (of what I’ve played anyway). It felt too generic, and the scenery was copy/pasted far too often to stay interesting. I was bored of it after the first 10 hours.

So Bethesda, when you make TES V, make sure you follow Morrowind moreso than Oblivion,. And take notes over all the cool stuff Obsidian did with the dialog and NPCs in NV. If you do this, you will have an excellent game on your hands.

Agreed. I didn’t like Oblivion much. It was the same wherever you went, and the world felt boring, like after the first couple of hours there was nothing left to uncover (which there wasn’t). Morrowind was infinitely better. The world felt hostile and dangerous outside the cities, and there was always some mysterious place to explore.

Unfortunately I suspect the next Elder Scrolls will be Oblivion but more so. Will probably have to wait for a good RPG from eastern Europe, that last bastion of PC purity.

I have it on good authority that TESV is presently in development on what appears to be a new engine. The new engine does not seem to be id Tech 5, though. If anything, it looks like a reworked variant of Gamebryo, which is what they’ve been using since Oblivion.

fffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuu God I hate that engine. I know, mods, amazing, and yes, they’re great; but the character models, the movement, and the way the terrain looed just absolutely turned me off Bethesda titles.

(If you don’t know what i mean by “movement”, launch FO3 or Oblivion and run/jump/roll in thirdperson. it’s awful.)

Gamebryo is actually just next version of what used to be called the NetImmerse engine, which is what they used to make Morrowind – it was a lot better in that game, so maybe there is hope that they can improve it again for TESV.

As far as I know, the game wasn’t meant to be played in 3rd person perspective. I was just glad they still included that view regardless of how bad the animations looked in 3rd person. Sure strafing and backwards movements look skatey but in all honesty I loved the movement in Oblivion for the most part.

I spent so much time just running around leaping from rock to rock and collecting flowers. Oh how I love Oblivion.

Bah… Oblivion was such a tragically ovverated piece of rubbish.
-Buggy and almost unplayable on release
-Level scaling is badly broken (game can be finished by a level 1 character)
-Level scaling means pesants all have top tier armor when you become high level
-Random / scaling loot means there’s really very little point in exploring

I agree reading that Alec thought oblivion was fun and that it was better than new vegas left me with this huge slice of how can someone’s opinion which is sometimes so similar to mine be so far divorced from it at other times. I thought Oblivion was a dull hiking simulator with repetitive fetch quests and no evident impetus for progressing.

So if you could have Oblivion with out the level scaling, with mobs having level appropriate gear then you’d have a better time? Me to. That’s why I got a “turn off the level scaling, and sort the loot out mod”. Oblivion’s modding community deserve awesome loads of credit and thanks to them it’s a very fine game (audio aesthetics aside). Certainly your specifics mentioned above are addressed by modders.

I get the feeling they’ve been on that engine too long to move to something else. Too much invested etc. Bloody hell do I hate that engine. I’ve found nothing that puts me into a rage faster than that f’ing engine (specifically FO3, though FO:NV seems to be worse based on reviews).

I’ve yet to finish the DLC for FO3 because I can’t f’ing play without the game crashing and pissing me off.

This is my biggest complaint about Oblivion. It’s the reason I never finished it, too. Why bother? If the enemies upscale to match you, level for level, what the hell is the point of the game? Which was a shame because I’d been mostly enjoying it until then. By the end of Morrowind I was a GOD.

I hope Bethesda’s artists can do something special this time. It felt like they limited themselves to pseudo-realistic made up medieval history when designing Oblivions visuals. In comparison to Morrowind the fantasy and magic didn’t fit quite so neatly with the Earthly game world. I feel Morrowind’s slightly wonky, sickly atmosphere made the fantasy elements more convincing.

Uh, CryEngine 3 will run on the PS3 and X360. Crytek has actually put a lot of work into designing their tools such that you don’t need to do much, if any, platform-specific work, favoring the “OUR COMPILER WILL FIGURE EVERYTHING OUT FOR YOU” approach.

That doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. It’s how you use the technology you have access to that counts.

It’s not quite the same but Unreal Engine 3, as used in corridor shooters like Gears of War et al, was used for Mass Effect 1 – which if you recall had large maps with little in the way of obvious loading breaks. Hell, Cryengine itself allows you to go wandering off around large environments rather than stay on the beaten track.

Then there’s Blizzard, explicitly designing an engine for use in Starcraft 2 that they can use in a variety of other ways too.

And wikipedia tells me that the 1st iteration of Cryengine was used in a Korean MMO, of all things.

I don’t see why you can’t like all three…. Oblivion/Fallout3/Fallout New Vegas… they all are worth playing. I prefer Fallout New Vegas overall, because of its depth. But Oblivion was awesome, it did high fantasy and exploration very well.

“You probably think it’s going to be rubbish, and amateurish, and oppressively nerdy.” <– the new TES game? I don't even have that much hope for it. Morrowind was amazing… it was a watermark in RPG's. Oblivion was a nice try, but it removed most of the things that (to me) made Morrowind so good, and wasn't very kind to what was left over. FO3 as well… severe dissapointment. And I've heard nought but bad news about NV, and I likely wouldn't touch it any way with that engine.

If they get a new Engine, make it PC exclusive, reintroduce all of the armour parts (greaves, pauldrons, etc), skills, armour types, weapons, weapon talents etc. from Morrowind, go back to no level scaling, give it the same support that Morrowind got after release (that means support, fixing bugs etc, not just making DLC so you can make some more money) and 2 full price expansions… basically, make a proper sequel to Morrowind… then I might give it a fishy stick.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that guy on the second verse do a collabo with Butterfingers or Hilltop Hoods, or some other Australian rapper. You guys should listen to both of those bands, by the way. The Hard Road: Restrung even has orchestral music.

We’ll expect more from the gameplay, and AI, and the general interaction in the gameworld, so the game will be even more demanding to build an engine for, yet we want less bugs and smoother animations?
I don’t think you can have it all, unless you’d have something like unlimited resources.

Sure, New Vegas was bad in that aspect because it was even buggier than Fallout 3, especially on release. But to think a new engine would solve all bugs and performance issues, and on top of that allow the game to expand on gameplay elements so that we can rightfully call it a sequel, rather than just a graphical update with old gameplay, I think we would be asking too much.

If they’re going to improve on the graphics, and on the general depth and details of the gameplay, they’re going to have to cut corners somewhere, one way or the other. The general attitude now is about the same as when Morrowind was the current game and we were looking forward to Oblivion.

We thought everything would have to be perfect. For the most part it was a big improvement but there were some issues due to the complex nature of the game, especially AI routines. Now we want things improved upon for the next elder scrolls but we’re once again asking the impossible. It’s like we haven’t learned from the very recent past and setting ourselves up for frustration.

I say for the next game, simplify the rpg elements even more (I know it’s not a popular thing to say, I dont give a damn) so there’s less that can go wrong that would cause bugs. Also simplify the interactions with npc’s a bit too, except dialog trees, which can be improved a lot, make it mass effect-esque. Don’t give the AI too many tasks, it’ll just bog up processing power. I don’t give a shit that this or that npc eats breakfast at 8 am, and the other gets up at 6 am and goes to bed at 9 pm. Most of the annoying bugs in the previous games on any engine had to do with the AI being dumbasses.

Make them simplistic where you can rather than making them all unnessecarily complicated. That’s why npc’s dissapear, start running away unexplicitly, attack you out of the blue, get stuck in some animation loop, you name it.

There’s plenty of great rpgs with simple npcs. If they prioritized on working like that, maybe we could have it all, better gameplay and better graphics, and a bigger more detailed world to explore.

I don’t give a damn about AI if the world and plot is completely stale. That’s why we were looking to Oblivion. We thought, “If we can have all of the interesting elements of Morrowind, and have it on an even more impressive engine with a fresh story/world/setting, I’m going to gizz my pants.”
What we got instead was a terrible story, a stale world with no interesting elements, and a mediocre medieval-fantasy setting. The engine was nice, the AI was okay, the combat system was vastly improved, but none of that mattered because the RP of the RPG was awful. Yet Oblivion was praised, so they did the samething for Fallout 3, and Fallout 3 was praised…

I’m not expecting much from the next Elder Scrolls game. Actually, I rather it not be made at all. I don’t think I can stand to see Bethesda rewarded for another mediocre game.

As much as I would love to be playing a new Elder Scrolls game right now. I can wait. Bethesda like to take time with their games and it’s understandable, given the huge amount of content in them. I’ve waited 2 years (It took the first 2 to be done with Oblivion) and I can wait as long as it take just as long as I know that they’re workin’ on it.

I don’t usually buy games on release but I think I’ll make an exception for TESV, whenever it comes.

All 4 games suffer from animation blending and NPC pathing issues. Enemies get stuck and turn pretty strangely. All 4 also don’t blend the animations to the world with footprints, play foot-falling sounds, and other things that make it feel disappointing.

The world designs have always been their strong points though. But it seems they are slowly downgrading their commitment to designing them however. Less areas to explore and get lost in the world. At least in Fallout 3 and New Vegas…

A new engine is what a lot of people want but there is still no word really on what is happening with Elderscrolls 5. Hopefully they do pick up on the ID Tech 5. Gamebyro is defunct now… Havok has AI pathfinding that came a bit too late for New Vegas I believe but it can be used now to stop enemies from getting stuck hopefully.

I remember in oblivion I was fighting some armored demon knight guy somewhere in a tower and I had died multiple times trying to kill him, on my last attempt he was down to like 10% health or something then he seemed to get his foot stuck in the floor and froze in a weapon over his head post, seriously anti climatic having a big nasty turn into a target dummy before I had the joy of finally beating him :( I think I quite playing it that night

I can understand finding Oblivion disappointing – it’s the opinion I’ve slowly gravitated towards over the years, though I was certainly impressed when it originally came out. Especially in comparison to the amazing, alien world of Morrowind. I’m somewhat baffled by people who found Fallout 3 even less satisfying, however, as it fixed nearly everything I disliked about Oblivion – a much more sensible levelling system (albeit compromised compared to the original Fallouts), and a world that did a much better job of rewarding exploration with cool things to find, whether it be unique weapons, skill enhancement books, the bobbleheads, or nuggets of story and a sense of place that Oblivion’s obsessively generic dungeons full of randomized level-scaling enemies and loot never managed. And if the majority of FO3’s quests did not quite reach the joys of the Dark Brotherhood questlines, at least they were generally never as dull as most of the rest of Oblivion’s quests.

New Vegas does everything FO3 did better and then some, of course. But I’d expect an Obsidian-helmed Elder Scrolls game to handily top Bethesda’s work too – they’re simply better at this whole “RPG” thing.

“New Vegas does everything FO3 did better and then some, of course. But I’d expect an Obsidian-helmed Elder Scrolls game to handily top Bethesda’s work too – they’re simply better at this whole “RPG” thing.”

This is quite unfair to Bethesda. Obsidian is far better at creating the pure RPG experience, but for the most part I’m starting to side with the hivemind on F3 being a better game. NV went way too far with the bleak atmosphere and wasteland feel because they sucked all the fun out of it (even with wild wasteland.)

When I played F3 all I did was pick a direction then headed off. Every time an empty arrow appeared I proclaimed joy because it was always something with depth or, at the least, variety. But after being led by the nose in a counter-clockwise loop to Boulder City I had had enough hollow rocks, empty caves, and one room shacks, so I said screw it and hoofed it to the strip hoping to find something fun to do besides trudging around poorly designed levels like a git.

Obsidian is really great at mechanics and characters (which is commendable in these times), but they really drop the ball every time when it comes to the fun. They really seem like an overly serious lot.

It’s weird to me to hear New Vegas (or Obsidian games in general) being described as too serious. Wild Wasteland has offered little more than a few mildly amusing pop culture references in my playthrough so far, but there’s plenty of other humor and fun stuff in New Vegas, like Best Friend Tabitha and Black Mountain Radio, or the Vikki & Vance Casino and the story behind that. Or consider the gloriously tongue-in-cheek signage and tour guide at the Repconn HQ.

It’s true that there’s also quite a bit of bleakness to the setting, what with the brutality of Caesar’s Legion, the exhausted pessimism of much of the NCR camps, and the sick psychological experiments played on the Vaults, but while Obsidian is, I think, expert at delivering these elements of the game, it’s always been a part of Fallout.

Also, while I would agree that most of the marked locations in Fallout 3 have -something- to offer the explorer and that’s less true of New Vegas locales, I chalk it up to Obsidian giving location markers to the kind of low key scenery spots that Bethesda included but didn’t mark. And of course, the difference between a crowded urban area and the Mojave desert.

I found the leveling, skills and attributes in Fallout 3 to be pretty bad. Level up, then dump skills wherever you like. The power of having a high intelligence attribute early on was even more imbalanced than the power of high endurance early on in Oblivion. Perks were nice, but that was about it. You couldn’t create a viable custom character to the same degree as in Oblivion. Small Guns are so prevalent it is almost a compulsory pick.

In general I don’t understand the Oblivion hatred. I still think it’s an excellent game.

But that’s pretty much the point of any of these games: you have the freedom to go to New Vegas and do other stuff. You don’t need to follow the laid out quest line path. In fact the whole loop around the mountain range is completely unnecessary to the the MQ, it’s just there to acquaint you with the world and the factions.

I did the ‘loop’ at my tempo and took the time to figure out who was who (faction-wise) and did odd-jobs left and right. When I finally arrived at New Vegas I was rich enough to easily pass the credit check and felt good about getting to the sprawling, luminous (all in Fallout terms) city I’d been seeing on the horizon at night during my journeys through the bleak wasteland. I mean, jeez, it’s the Mojave desert.

Also: big points to NV for restoring the Brotherhood of Steel to what they were (an isolationist organisation obessed with old tech) instead of the F3 Brotherhood which was very unlike the one we know from F1 and F2.

The levelling system in Fallout 3 was not very well balanced and many of the perks were pointless or boring. That doesn’t prevent it from being vastly better than the Oblivion levelling system. Frankly, I’ve always hated the Elder Scrolls levelling system. I enjoyed Morrowind despite it, certainly not because of it.

Of the three recently made Bethesda games I’m going to honestly say Oblivion gets beaten up a bit too much.

I’m not outright saying Oblivion is superior in all ways to Morrowind but Oblivion just had better quests (not a better main quest) than Morrowind. Oblivion’s greatest flaw, besides interface, was the setting was dull and got tiring fast.

If they could mesh the quests for Oblivion with Morrowind’s alien take on setting and atmosphere for ESV, it would be the best thing they rolled out ever.

I’m looking forward to TES 5, but I’ve got plenty of quality Bethesda game to keep me occupied until it turns up. I’ve probably played out Morrowind (some 4 digit number of hours sunk into that one) but I’ve barely played Oblivion (looking forward to a first serious play with FCOM, to fix that nasty level scaling nonsense), and don’t have New Vegas yet. Fallout 3 I’ve played for a few hundred hours but there’s still a ton I haven’t seen, and with FWE it’s a joy to play.

If the engine hasn’t been decided yet, let me suggest far cry 2’s Dunia engine, it’s capable of great graphics, although it’s mostly the work of individual animators, we know great animations can be done in this engine, and renders a big open world with very little pop-up and lag when moving between cells, and handles vehicles really well too so we could have horses that don’t feel like a chore. The fire stuff would also be awesome, imagine spells actually burning or freezing the environment. Magic would become a fun and viable option in an elder scrolls game omg. It seems moddable, although ubisoft never really supported that.

And the biggest up-side would be that it runs great on medium specced pc’s nowadays.

Only problem I can think of is that it would require some sort of deal with Ubisoft. And that right there is why it will never happen.

If the next Elderscrolls is going to be even half as good as this guy rhymes, I might actually like it. There rhymes are pretty awesome, Oblivion sure wasn’t.

I can’t seem to fathom how anybody could like Oblivion at all, let alone this much. To me it was the perfect example of an empty, soulless and half hearted effort to make an epic RPG. What does it really have? Graphics? Nope. Animations? Nope. Music/Sound? Maybe. Storyline? Nope. Good side quests? Not here. Many cool items and spells? Maybe next time. Stellar voice acting? Simply not. Clever AI? Uh-huh. Unique landscape with many interesting landmarks? Uniquely boring maybe … What does this game really offer? No sense of exploration and adventure when every hidden and or locked chest you find holds the same fork, mug and biscuit every other container contains. WTF …

Looking forward to a proper review of Two Worlds 2, that game seems, from the little I’ve heard, to do a much better job than Oblivion could ever do in its wettest dream.

I have to applaud the chap for a rather well done rap and video, but I do have to say that I never was so bored out of my mind as in any of the Elder Scrolls.

Then again I’m the kind of guy who prefers to actually have a point when doing something and direction, and purpose. Not this kind of “So hai, here’s this humonguous world and we really don’t care what you spend your time with, though you might be able to find a plot thrown in if you just look carefully enough.”.

Dunno, I always felt that if I wanted to go into a fantasy world a good book is much more interesting. Or, if I wanted to be astounded by FX and CGI, a really properly well done movie.

Only few games manage to bridge the gap with a mix of great game world and open, yet semi-concise game plot. Deus Ex and VTM Bloodlines did it fairly well, and others have, too…the issue with it I think is mostly making the world itself interesting enough to actually get me to bother with it.

And just making every cup and candleholder an item just does not cut it for me.
_IF_ it were to fascinate me as a plain “Giant open world where you can do anything” it would have to do far, far more, too. As in infinite possibilities (murderrapebecomekindchangelawshavechildrenrunbakeryorundergroundbrothelleadwarsdestroyhalftheworldexplodecitieshaveandparticipateinchariotracesandinventthelightsaber) and not just “This is about as much as a budget can strain to, now just feel really happy it’s already as insanely broad and filled with pointless NPC chatter as is”.

So, rather have more compact and to-the-point smart/funky stuff like Giants: Citizen Kabuto or Sacrifice or MDK come back than yet-another-superduper-open-roaming-world title.

Conversations about the next Elder Scrolls being more Morrowindy make me a sad panda. You sweet little cherubs with your sweet little doe eyes upturned, wishing so hard and pleading to the Zenimax overlords to bring back the uniqueness of that game… it’s so sad to see people hoping for that in which there can truly be no hope.

You know all those things that made Morrowind truly special? The alien and intensely atmospheric environments? The strange, otherworldly architecture? The truly inhospitable wilds that required thought and progress before you could tranverse them safely? The insanely dangerous enemies that you eventually make your little bitches because you have saved up so much money and leveled so much that you’re a walking God? The feeling of exploring a unique world populated with many distinct cultures?

People DIDN’T LIKE THOSE THINGS.

I’m not talking about those of us posting here now (the anointed). I’m talking about People; the ones who, en masse, do the buyin’. And these people want familiar. They want instant gratification. I know this because I read all their complaints after Morrowind came out, and I distinctly remember wishing I could set each and every one of those motherfuckers on fire. But soon I could see the writing on the wall, and Bethesda clearly did too.

Now, Morrowind was FAR from perfect, but it excelled in the ways that really matter. And Oblivion was far from terrible; in fact, there was a lot I had a deep respect for. But ultimately it was boring. It was barely a fantasy environment; a vast majority of it could be straight out of European history books. A huge amount of time is spent in castles, dungeons that just look like castles but with blue lights, shacks, and grassy forests. Once in a while you go into Oblivion. Sometimes a weird beast would attack you with a +1 Spell Of Out Of Context in the middle of a beautiful field of grass, dotted with flowers and ringed by majestic trees. And the fucking leveling… no more needs to be said.

People ate that shit up. The entire world bought Oblivion. For fuck’s sake, Zenimax made so much money they bought id Software! You think they’re going to dial back all the stuff in Oblivion, make it more intellectually and mechanically challenging, and reduce the appeal? NOT LIKELY.

Also, totally unrelated to anything listed above; most of the weapons and all of the armor looked like shit.